Effaced into Flesh: Black Women's Subjectivity

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SOURCE: “Effaced into Flesh: Black Women's Subjectivity,” in On Your Left: The New Historical Materialism in the 1990's, edited by Ann Kibbey, Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen Berry, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 184–205.

[In the following essay, Brody dwells on the image of the black female in “The Winding Sheet,” applying black feminist theory to concepts of race and gender.]

When do we start to see images of the black female body … made as acts of auto-expression, the discrete stage that must immediately precede or occur simultaneously with acts of auto-critique? When does the present begin?

—Lorraine O'Grady, “Olympia's Maid”

Artist Lorraine O'Grady's questions pose an important problem for black feminist theory: how can black female flesh be represented as other than an other's other given that the coherence and specificity of black female subjects is effaced by the logic that cannot produce her positionality except paradoxically?1 Reading black female bodies in literary discourse is difficult because, to use Kimberle Crenshaw's term, the “intersectionality” of the black female subject positions her at the crossroads of competing discourses of race and gender.2 This “intersectionality” is problematic because “such a formulation erases the specificity of black women's experiences, constituting her [only] as the point of intersection between black men's and white women's experience.”3 By being represented in or as the nexus of a schematic that denies her existence, the symbolic black female subject is forced to occupy the false and often oppositional position between race and gender. Too many feminist accounts read this black female subject as an “oxymoronic singularity.”4 Such readings do not take seriously black feminist theory's central tenet that race and gender are mutually constitutive, not mutually exclusive.5

This essay asks if and how it is possible to develop a reading strategy that does not replicate the effacement of black women's subjectivities. It calls for black feminist criticism that argues for the specificity and diversity of African American women's experiences in the United States by working against the categories available which are unable to account for black female subjects' complex but not necessarily incoherent differences. If black feminist theory requires that one read race and gender together in order not to efface black women as “coherent” subjects, perhaps the black female's present presence will begin when black feminist theory is employed as a weapon/tool for thinking about the ways in which race and gender work in literary culture. The following discussion of Ann Petry's prize-winning short story “Like a Winding Sheet” (1946) dramatizes the difficulties incurred by denying the dynamic differences of black female subjects.6

“Like a Winding Sheet” delineates the impossible position of black female flesh in American cultural discourse. An apt subtitle for this tale might be: “All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, and Some of Us Are Brave”—the title of the well-known anthology of feminist writing by women of color.7 This phrase summarizes the central characters in “Like a Winding Sheet,” who are two racist white women; a black man, Johnson; and his not-fully-fleshed-out “brave” black wife, Mae. The story demonstrates that the shifting positionality of Mae's body—whose very name suggests her (im)possibility and instability—can only constitute her as a contingent, incoherent subject.

In Petry's piece, various binaries are dissolved and/or reconfigured in and between a black man and a black woman. The black woman's body straddles the multiple identities—is fixed as flesh rather than as a coherent, stable body. Petry's parable of race/gender relations in the United States exquisitely distills the difference between socially constructed (white) woman and the black female who, as Hortense Spillers explains, is figured as flesh in a violent American landscape.8 Here, the black woman's body proves to be only a fictionally and temporarily stable ground. If in “same-race” encounters the difference that gender makes seems to be highlighted, this essay, by calling for reading black women as coherent subjects—demonstrates that even in such same race encounters, the black woman's specificity must not be erased. In short, Petry's story vividly illustrates the danger of relying on a binary opposition between race and gender.

So too, it illustrates the limitations of critics who would argue that visibility and voice are the crucial assets required for a viable black female social subject. It does so because in the story, Mae's visibility and voice are revealed to be liabilities rather than assets for this black female subject whose presence is (mis)read as being purely paradoxical: “This paradox, that only the black female stands in the flesh. … This problematizing of gender places her … out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject.”9 In order to combat the tendency to represent black female social subjects as “split,” silent, and therefore disempowered subjects, theorists must work to eliminate the various categories and discourses that continue to inscribe black women as incommensurate and oxymoronic rather than “merely” complex entities.10

I analyze the erasure and/or impossibility of the black female subject with the simultaneous construction of her as “ungendered flesh.” This simultaneous facing and effacement of the black woman is a key integer in the calculus that formulates American race and gender in this story. The gendered performances represented in Petry's story form the genesis of my argument that “black woman” is an incommensurate construction in much official U. S. discourse that continues to associate “race” with blacks and “gender” with women.11 Too often, then, the conjunction “race and gender” works to occlude women of color because race can only signify “blackness” and “gender” stands in for (white) women. It is from this perspective that one can read Petry's story as a paradigmatic parable of race and gender relations in U. S. culture.

“Like a Winding Sheet” poignantly describes a day in the life of a working-class black couple in the 1940s at the same time that it portrays and plays with the triangulated constructions of race and gender. The story focuses a fateful Friday the 13th in the 1940s when Mr. Johnson, a black man, is ravaged by the racism he encounters at his factory job and in a New York restaurant. The time period is significant because World War II “marked an important break with the historic allocation of work by race and sex.”12 For the first time in history, “blacks” and “women” entered manufacturing jobs in record numbers—especially in the North where the story takes place.

The story begins and ends in the Johnsons' apartment, which is the only space where Mrs. Johnson appears. Indeed, her body frames the text in both senses of the word. The story is representative, perhaps even stereotypical, in that, baldly stated, it is the tale of a (black) man beaten by a (capitalist) system who then beats his (black) wife. What keeps Petry's piece from being cliched (besides the fact that such abuse continues to occur) is Petry's deft employment of structural repetitions and her overt attention to the conflicting constructions of gender across the fault lines of racial injustice.

In American discourses, the invisible forces of racism, classism, and sexism often materialize in the flesh of working-class black females. The imbricated identity of this black female subject serves as the locus for other competing identities on the national landscape. Thus, Mae's body simultaneously disintegrates into and materializes as the flesh that binds and repels signs of (white/black, male/female) power. Despite the analogies made between Mae, the black wife, and the other (also working-class) white women in the text (for example, all wear red lipstick), the story concludes with the black woman becoming “soft flesh” (22) that is pummelled repeatedly by her race-plagued husband, who “could never bring himself to hit a ‘woman’”—even a racist white woman. The problem of “what it is to be a woman” is an important issue in Petry's text.

Initially, the opening exchanges between Johnson and his wife in their bedroom are sanguine, but they quickly degenerate when Mae's dialogue directs the reader's attention to Johnson's pain-ridden body. Unlike her body, which is an absent presence throughout the story, his body is fetishized and palpable by Mae's discourse as well as the narrator's. This reversal of the conventions of narrative description works to “feminize” his body at the same time that it erases Mae's body and makes her immaterial. She is the touched and unseen—a present absence. We know she has a body because she has a voice, and she puts on overalls, but it is Johnson's body, weary from work, that “stands out” and is made tangible by Mae and the author.

Throughout the tale, seen almost exclusively through Johnson's eyes, the reader never really sees Mae. She is heard in the bathroom in the opening paragraph. The narrator does not describe her physical characteristics: rather, Johnson's conversation with Mae is recorded in the dialogue. The only sense of Mae's body comes from a momentary description of her overalls. Unlike Janie Crawford's overalled body in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) that registers and evokes an exalted and debased body whose femaleness is both encased in and bursting forth from this typically ungendered, class-marked clothing, Mae's overalls cover all of her body: they are the androgynous uniform of “a worker.”13 Mae's overalls mask her individuality.

Mae's greatest power here is her voice. Moreover, her words work as a weapon against her husband in a manner analogous to the scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God when Janie cuts/kills/castrates her second husband Joe “Ah God” Starks with her words. Mae sees her husband and proclaims that he looks as if he is wrapped in “a shroud” (199). She tells him, “You look like a huckleberry—in a winding sheet—” (Ibid.). She highlights Johnson's body as he awakens in twisted bedsheets. Even before the sheet is identified as being explicitly “white,” readers familiar with American iconography assume that it is white. Indeed, it must be for the simile to work. Mae's statement echoes the vernacular phrase “like a fly in butter-milk” and functions as a metaphor for the individual black being who too often is belittled and engulfed by an oppressive white system.14 The title recalls “the big white backdrop that people of color have charged against for ages making a mark here and there.”15 This metaphoric configuration of the national body constructs colored minorities as belated blemishes on the white amorphous face of America. Mae's reading of Johnson as a being enmeshed in the constraining fabric of American culture opposes this latter configuration of the color that stains a foundational, already-woven entity. Petry exposes the fallacy of a purely white America by pointing out the similarities and therefore the differences between the characters in her classic American tale.

At this point in the story, Johnson and his wife are still capable of compassionate communication. They discuss whether or not it is wise to venture out on Friday the 13th and it is Johnson who soothes his wife's superstitions by endorsing rational capitalism that claims wages as the most salvational fruits of work. He quips “Friday is payday—always a good day” (201). The fact that his statements convince Mae demonstrates the extent to which she too is trapped in the values of this system. The necessities of surviving in the urban jungle cancel the value of Mae's traditional folklore. Thus, Johnson succeeds in convincing Mae that it is safe to leave the house.

Pleased with his ability to allay Mae's fears—although it has made him late for work again—the narrator confides that “He couldn't bring himself to talk to her roughly or threaten to strike her like a lot of men might have done. He wasn't made that way” (200). We learn, however, by the end of the story that he was made to be that way when he lashes out at Mae, hitting her repeatedly. He comes to believe that he is a victim of “the system”—of hypocritical American values. Ironically, Mae's sense of doom and danger is realized in the story; but not as she had imagined it. Rather than being abused by the world outside her home, Mae is obliterated in her own bedroom—in the most private and intimate spaces of her life. This serves as a metaphor for the pervasive, insidious (and for too many individuals invisible) force of racism. The reach of racist discourse can be seen even in Mae's jesting with her husband.

Mae's racially inflected commentary objectifies her husband. She stresses the fact that Johnson knows himself only in contrast to the white of the sheet—as merely a “silhouette against the white spread of the sheets [that outline his body]” (199). Mae's objectification of him as well as the fact that she ushers in his metaphorical death through her naming of the “shroud” interrupts the previously lighthearted mood of the story. Her voice strikes a discordant note and causes Johnson to protest against her statements. He retorts, “That's no way to talk, early in the day like this” (199). Although Johnson is just waking up, it is not “early in the day”; rather, it is four o'clock in the afternoon. Since Johnson works the late shift at the plant, he is required to sleep in the day. What is described as the “off-time” of his waking marks his class positionality. He leads an “unnatural” life in that he has been forced by the circumstance of the war to work “odd” hours.

Like many other workers, including Mae, he leads a highly regulated and restricted life that is centered on earning wages. In Petry's naturalistic narrative, bodies respond to external conditions. The workers' bodies, as Elaine Scarry has asserted, often take on the characteristics of their work. Johnson epitomizes those “disinherited from time and reified in space; [these disenfranchised black bodies in America] are presented with death. For to remove people from the voice, from signification, from time, to immure them in obscurity and obdurate materiality is to figure and enforce their death—but a death by no means natural. On the contrary, this death is the upshot of perpetual murder.”16 The workers in the tale are subjected to the rigidity of this capitalistic system. At work, Johnson is subsumed by his animalism. As Hurston claims of the workers in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “Mules and other brutes [occupy the workers'] skin” (10). Speech is nearly “impossible” in the plant where the whir of the machinery mutes all. The men and women themselves are reduced to machines—their mouths move but no sounds are audible from a distance.

Johnson, as well as the other workers in the plant, is perpetually late. His lateness serves as the impetus for his white female boss's racist remarks.17 His boss, named Mrs. Scott, chastises Johnson for his chronic tardiness. She complains, “The niggers is the worse … I'm sick of you niggers” (202). Johnson softly replies, “You got the right to be mad. You got the right to curse me four ways to Sunday but I ain't letting nobody call me nigger.” This calm verbal defiance contrasts with his hard body language as if to underscore again the mind/body split that continues to be refigured in the story. The narrator explains that “His fists … doubled [and] … a vein on his forehead stood out, swollen thick” (202). The forelady slowly backs away and mumbles “it slipped out, I didn't mean nothing by it.” It is only in the slip, the moments of rupture, that the violence of systemic racism reveals itself.

It should not surprise the reader, then, that Johnson's first confrontation with the boss comes in the form of a glance—in the privileged realm of the mind's eye. This glance signals the psychosexual aspects of Johnson's encounter with his white female boss. “He pushed his cart toward the foreman. He never could remember to refer to her as the forelady even in his mind” (201). She is not called a forewoman (the term used to describe the white female factory boss in Audre Lorde's Zami); but a forelady whose race is inscribed in her gender.18 Johnson thought that “It was funny to have a white woman [which should signify a lady] for a boss in a plant like this one.” He describes her eyes as being “half-shut until they were slits.” He “couldn't resist stealing a glance at her out of the corner of his eyes. He saw the edge of the light-colored slacks she wore and the tip end of a big tan shoe.” The partial, obscured, and furtive glance is revealing. It suggests Johnson's conflicting desires toward his female boss. He cannot remember yet cannot forget to call her “forelady.” So, too, as such signifiers as slacks and big shoes suggest, her gendered status is altered by her performance of the boss's role. She becomes masculinized, while he is feminized.

It is important to remember that the wartime economy has placed both Johnson and the forelady in a power relation which is both systematically absolute and culturally tenuous. The white man's absence opens a space in which both characters struggle to assert the power promised by her race and his gender. This is to say that, the wartime economy may have offered black men the “promise” of employment only to reinscribe their disempowerment by placing white women in this space. That Petry has chosen to have white women implicated in the racism of America is important. This strategy refigures the paranoid image of black men and white women fostered by the paradigmatic film Birth of a Nation and strengthens the alliance between white and black at the same time that it foregrounds gender. In other words, in hegemonic representations of black men and white women, the latter often is figured as victim, the former as violator; however, in Petry's piece the black man becomes, momentarily, the victim of a white woman's racism.

The female foreman's official role of authority requires that Johnson be subservient to her; however, it is his recognition of her gender that keeps him at bay. Johnson vainly tries to control his body, virtually to no avail since his fists remain clenched and ready to strike. Johnson “turned away from the sight of the red lipstick on her mouth that made him remember that the foreman was a woman. And he couldn't bring himself to hit a woman” (203). The female foreman's presence in the factory, particularly since she occupies a position of power, calls Johnson's own gender into question. He is positioned as a “black boy” and thus his manhood is rendered not definitive but rather always in the process of being defined by others. Like Shadrack in Morrison's Sula, Johnson loses control of his hands, they become monstrous instruments.19

And he thought he should have hit her anyway, smacked her hard in the face, felt the soft flesh of her face give under the hardness of his hands. He tried to make his hands relax by offering them a description of what it would have been like to strike her because he had the queer feeling that his hands were not exactly part of him any more—they had developed a separate life of their own over which he had no control. So he dwelt on the pleasure his hands would have felt—both of them cracking at her … if he had done that, his hands would have felt good now—relaxed, rested.

(203-4)

This sexualized description of tension and the release that would have “satisfied” him is reminiscent of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) as well as the unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) who wants to “caress [the blonde] and destroy her, love her and murder her.”20

As Abdul JanMohammed has asserted, “in the economy of racialized sexuality, white women represent exchange value between white men and black men, whereas black women represent only use value for both. If Mary [who is white] constitutes a metaphor of desire on the racial border, then Bessie [who is black] functions as a metonymy of that metaphor.”21 Of course, in Petry's story the white man is the missing integer. Thus, there is a tension between her whiteness (as power) and her femaleness that can in part be resolved by Johnson's disguised rape fantasy. The forelady here is simultaneously a victim of sexism and a perpetrator of racism. Johnson diffuses his competing desires in this dense passage in which he imagines the pleasure of release from his painful position. “The only trouble was, he couldn't bring himself to hit a woman. A woman couldn't hit back the same way a man did. But it would have been deeply satisfying to have cracked her narrow lips wide open with just one blow, beautifully timed and with all his weight at the back of it” (204). This rape fantasy reveals Johnson's desire to have a fair fight and to fight the fair.

Johnson holds on to a chivalrous code “one should not hit a woman,” that, though cast in the unconditional, disregards conditions of context. This code is “outmoded” for Johnson, who faces a female foreman. As James Thurber, another important 1940s American writer, remarks, “Word has somehow got around that the split infinitive is always wrong. That is of a piece with the outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady.”22 Johnson's control of his own anger preserves the power structure. In other words, by refusing to hit his female foreman he refuses to break the archaic maxim (to split the imperative)—“one must never hit a woman.”

What Johnson sees and hears and marks as “woman” are the “signs” of womanliness. He stumbles over the female foreman as a problematic figure that disrupts the “cult of true womanhood” ideal of white women in America—but he still manages to see her as a “woman” even if only furtively and with frustration. He catalogues her “womanly” features such as her “angry red mouth” (vagina dentata?) and, in the second instance, a waitress's “feminine” gestures. Ultimately, Mae's mimicking of these white women's words and gestures provokes her husband to strike her. Whereas earlier in the story, Johnson manages to restrain himself from actually hitting the white women, the penalty for which might have been death by castration and lynching—he is unable to control these impulses with Mae.

The second incident in the story confirms and concretizes Johnson's conflict with (racist) white women. After his painful, alienating work at the plant, he confronts the long commute home to Harlem. Emerging from the crowded underground subway, he stops outside a restaurant window. Though artificial, the place and its fetishized objects are repeatedly described as “alive.” He catalogues “the steam from the coffee urn, with its lively dancing blue flame, the imitation marble counter” (205), finding this artificial life of stimulants, bells, time-clocks, and automatons somehow seductive. He focuses “on the men's hands holding the thick white cups of coffee. He did not pay attention to the white girl who was serving the coffee at the urn” (206). He becomes the coffee surrounded by thick white world. The very detailed description of the coffee cup with its “bubbles bursting on the brim” is almost Keatsian. Such a sensuous description of the coffee serves to sharpen the waitress's snub and may also suggest her action as a kind of sexual snub.

When Johnson's turn to get coffee comes, the white waitress tells him: “No more coffee for a while. … He wanted to hit her so hard that the scarlet lipstick on her mouth would smear and spread over her nose, her chin, out towards her cheeks, so hard that she would never toss her head again and refuse a cup of coffee to a man because he was black” (207). His desire to strike out has increased after having been exacerbated by the forelady. In this scene, he seems to want to hit the waitress because she is a woman who will not serve him, rather than in spite of this fact. Again, the minute differences in power are revealed in Petry's careful prose. “He forced himself to lower [his hands], to unclench them and make them dangle loose … he couldn't hit her. He couldn't even now bring himself to hit a woman, not even this one, who had refused him a cup of coffee” (207). He continues to assign, ascribe, and invest gender with specific characteristics requiring prohibitions. As the world sees him perpetually bleeding back into a black stereotype, a “nigger,” so the white women materialize before his eyes as “women not to be hit.” Even in his rage, Johnson records his antagonists as gendered bodies that he recognizes as women as he is distinguished from and recognized as being different from the other “men” in the line.

Although the white women in the story are Johnson's actual targets, his wrath warps the face of Mae, whom he transforms and marks as black female flesh in the face of his sexualized racism and racialized sexism. This is to say that Mae, as her name suggests, functions as an ambivalent substance whose black femaleness is and is not secured. The danger with such a figuration is that it ultimately denies black women's subjectivity since they cannot be read on their own terms. Black women do not emerge as “coherent” (which is not the same thing as essential) subjects in this equation.

Here, Johnson's violence against his wife is reminiscent of Teacake's violence toward Janie. Hitting the female flesh, “relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession … he just slapped her around a bit to show her who was boss” (Hurston, 85). The blows meted out by these male characters are meant to ensure their own limited power. Johnson's deformation of his wife's body is similar to Eldridge Cleaver's grotesque quest to defile white women in which he “refined [his raping] technique … by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day.”23

When Mae unwittingly “lifts the hair from the back of her neck,” exactly as the white waitress had done, she replicates the white women's gestural femininity and reminds her husband of the racism he had encountered. In this scene where Johnson reads Mae's gestures, the reader learns nothing of the racism she may have encountered in her day; rather, Mae's story is relegated to the background which allows Johnson to be the central racial subject. His reading transforms Mae by relying upon the unethical aesthetics of Jim Crow whose goal it was “to produce in the mundane gestures of everyday life a pervasive theater of comparison.”24 Mae becomes an accessible target when she tenderly teases her husband and jokingly calls him “nigger.” Johnson's unstated rationale for hitting Mae requires that he misread this utterance as if it were the same as the white woman's “nigger.” This misreading unfairly casts Mae's playful “nigger” as “the same” as his white boss's denigrating usage.25

Johnson's rage at Mae's otherwise innocuous comment is recorded as follows: “The funny tingling started in his fingertips … and sent his fist shooting straight for her face … there was the smacking sound of soft flesh … she screamed … he had hit her in the mouth—so hard that the dark red lipstick had blurred and spread over her full lips, reaching up … and … down … and out toward her cheeks” (210).26 In this description, Johnson has effaced Mae and replaced her face with her genitals. The open and bleeding orifices framed by lips and cheeks are one in this rhetorical gesture. At this moment, he understands her only through a dangerous analogy. This “violence of sameness—exerts a different kind of violence, a violence that occurs to a group whose difference is effaced.”27 In the evanescent spatio-temporal moment between facing and effacement—reading the relation between sameness and difference—the problem of representing black female subjectivity appears. In this situation,

[the non-white woman's] place is outside what can be conceived of as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West's construct of the female body, for the “femininity” of the white female body is insured by assigning the non-white to a chaos safely removed from sight.


Thus, only the white body remains as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze. The non-white body has been made opaque by a blank stare … [or in Mae's case, a frank fist].

(O'Grady, 14)

In short, the imbrication of race and gender is inextricable. Moreover, it is the power of Johnson's fist that identifies this unbreakable juncture.

Johnson's clenched fist, the fist of the black man, is both weapon and tool. Elaine Scarry delineates the difference between a weapon and a tool by maintaining that one can distinguish between these instruments according to the surfaces on which they fall.28 She gives the example of the clenched fist and claims that the fist “may be either a weapon or a tool” (173). Unfortunately, Scarry does unpack the meaning of these differences. Johnson in a way is only weapon or tool—limited, restricted, and operated at the behest of an unseen general system. He is generic, as his name implies, and without individuality or humanity. If we accept this reading, then we see that Scarry does not make space for those whose primary value is only as weapons or tools—often black bodies in America. To continue, the weapon/tool dichotomy is dependent upon the difference between sentient and nonsentient surfaces. “The hand that pounds a human face is a weapon and the hand that pounds the dough for bread … is a tool” (Ibid.). And what of the hand that pounds black female flesh?

In light of the problematic placement and particularity of black female flesh, this question disrupts Scarry's reading of the supposedly fixed binary of sentient and nonsentient surfaces that distinguishes between tools and weapons. What Johnson thinks is a weapon against a racist system is simultaneously a tool operated by the system to keep such power in place. Black men and women, among others, have been positioned in hegemonic structures as only tools and weapons and that is the violence of this system. To label something a weapon when it is aimed at an unsanctioned target and a tool when it hits a sanctioned target is to assume one knows the “identities” of “surfaces” in advance when surely the tool/weapon would construct the meaning of the surfaces. The substitution of the black woman for the white woman effects the material transformation and substantiation. The black woman stands in for the (im)material white woman and problematically illustrates the (in)difference of wounding and creating. Mae is a floating signifier who is pounded into symptomatic meaning by Johnson's blows. She is reduced to the role of (un)marked flesh between two incommensurate structures in the American law.

At the moment that Johnson tests his own destructive power against the soft flesh of Mae, he also discovers his own limitations. Jean-Paul Sartre's formulation of the fascinating power of viscous material and its relationship to structures of identity-formation might also help to summarize the meaning of the eruptive ending of Petry's story. Sartre's reading of the slimy (which he tellingly labels feminine and exemplifies as honey) concurs with my reading of Mae's body as it is inscribed at the climax of this story. Sartre writes:

The slimy substance, like pitch, is an aberrant fluid. The slimy reveals itself as essentially ambiguous because its fluidity exists in slow motion. There is a sticky thickness in its liquidity. It presents itself as a phenomena in the process of becoming … for the soft is only an annihilation which is stopped halfway; soft is what furnishes us with the best image of our own destructive [and constructive] power and its limitations.29

The compressible complexity of Mae's black female body—her position as the “doubly so” in a process of becoming is created and destroyed by Johnson's blows. She is stopped halfway. Precisely at the moment that Johnson strikes Mae, he marks her as a woman and as black female flesh. She is a “fixed instability” (Sartre, 778). She is the double marker that he in one blow creates and destroys. The concluding action of the story must be read as a double gesture—in (at least) two ways. For, with the final blow, Johnson does ultimately hit a woman, but with the crucial difference that he hits a black woman who is also his wife. This last detail is important because he has a specific claim of ownership and power over her that is missing in his relationships with the white women. Johnson's idea of difference adheres to what Monique Wittig describes as “difference as a concept … [used] to mask at every level the conflicts of interest, including ideological ones.”30

Sartre's trope of viscosity provides us with a means to “explain” the difficulty of figuring black female flesh. Feminist critics who take up Sartre's reading, such as Mary Douglas, do not think about “race” or see that such theories of flesh may also be used to designate aspects of black women's subjectivity. From a eurocentric perspective that seeks to make (white) woman the body of Western metaphysics, one misses the fact that so-called Third World figures have also been forced to fill the devalued half of the Cartesian split. By reading viscosity as a trope that produces black female subjectivity, we can begin to question the singular foundations and efficacy of certain theories.31 It is just such a different culturally inscribed reading that might begin to undo the overly specific valences that Douglas and Sartre, among others, associate with viscosity.

Although she does not specifically name black women as potential subjects, Elizabeth Grosz's contention that “Identity itself is the solidification or coagulation of … potentially volatile and unstable differences,”32 is also applicable to my argument. According to this reading, Grosz's so-called momentary solidification is a goal for black female subjectivity—especially where black women are seen only as volatile and unstable. Black female flesh seems always to be broken down, unable to be read even in specific situations as performing coherence and difference simultaneously. This construction runs counter to the previous ones we have seen that insist on reading black female flesh from outside as that which must be feared because it “has no boundaries of its own [italics mine]. This is not a property of the viscous itself; in keeping with Douglas's claims about dirt [which she defines as matter out of place], what is disturbing about the viscous … is its refusal to conform to the laws governing the clean and the proper, the solid and self-identical” (Grosz, 195). The difficulty of reading black female subjectivity, which in certain frames is understood as being “diffuse in itself” or without clear boundaries, is not a property of black female flesh per se; rather, this flesh must be recognized by cultural rules that tend to prohibit her representation as an actual agent of her own subjectivity. Again, despite the fact that none of these feminist critics references black women in particular, their formulations of flesh can be used to denote black women.

The black woman as she is produced at the end of Petry's story resembles Luce Irigaray's generalized “awoman” who “mixes with bodies of a like state, sometimes it dilutes itself in them in an almost homogeneous manner, which makes the distinction between the one and the other problematical; and furthermore that it is already diffuse ‘in itself’ … disconcerts any attempt at static identification.”33 Why is the black woman read as being always already “diffuse in itself” when all postmodern subjects are in theory “not one thing” but rather defined differently and able to exert power differentially in certain contained contexts? If there is no absolute sovereignty, then black women do/can have agency and subjectivity—just none recognized by the law. In juridical discourse she must always be only other's (as in black man or white woman) other and therefore she cannot be “other to herself.” Again, this reading occludes the differences among black women themselves vis-a-vis ideology, sexuality, class, and/or color not to mention individual personality. Thus, the black female subject continues to be reproduced as an interstitial ideal.

In her article “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers criticizes artist Judy Chicago's 1970s installation piece “The Dinner Party” for (mis)representing black women. Chicago's art work, completed over several years by a collective of artisans, commemorates more than one hundred women who have been “swallowed up and eaten by history.”34 The piece pays tribute to selected individual feminist “heroes” by depicting each of them with a unique “vaginal” image painted on a plate.

The only black female represented with a plate of her own among the dinner guests at Chicago's party is Sojourner Truth of “Ain't I a Woman” fame. As in many feminist works, Sojourner Truth is cast as the most privileged black woman at the gathering. She appears as feminism's “metonymic black woman.”35 Truth's representation gestures toward my central problematic because it points precisely to the difficult gendering of black female flesh. Unlike Lorna Simpson's “counter-realist” phototexts in which the artist's “choice not to show faces—articulate[s] the limits of the dominant representations of black women, which have shown everything only to de-face black women as subjects,” Judy Chicago's replacement of Truth's face is also a displacement of her genitals and a double denial of the black woman's subjectivity.36 “This denial or effacement works because … as the female figures around [Truth] are imagined through ingenious variations on the vagina, she is inscribed by three faces. As Alice Walker comments, ‘There is of course a case to be made for being personified by a face, rather than by a vagina, but that is not what this show is about,’”37 Walker's point is important given the historical valorization of black women's vaginal capabilities, especially in the slave economy.

What, then, are we to make of Chicago's marking of Truth? Does the representation disrupt the historical representation of black women's “genetic/genital” difference or does it subtly replicate this history through distortion? Does it suggest that black women have been or are “desexed” in a specific form of racial violence as black men were and are castrated in lynching? Spillers argues that in Chicago's piece, Truth is “a face whose orifices are still searching for a proper role in relationship to the female body” (“Interstices,” 78). She continues:

The structure of the unreality that the black woman must confront originates in the historical moment when language ceases to speak, the historical moment at which hierarchies of power, (even ones to which some women belong) simply run out of terms because the empowered meets in the black female the veritable nemesis of degree and difference. Having encountered what they understand as chaos, the empowered need not name further, since chaos is sufficient naming within itself.

(“Interstices,” 77)

This commentary clearly presents the problem of reading black women as “chaos.” So too, this description of how black women can become the “nemesis of degree and difference” is, as we have seen, the central subject of Petry's short story. Moreover, Spillers's use of the term “flesh” coincides with other definitions of this trope. For example, “Flesh is the term Merleau-Ponty uses to designate being, not as plenitude, self-identity, or substance but as divergence or non-coincidence—being's most elemental level” (Grosz, 100). This understanding of flesh allows us to see how black women, without a “unified” subjectivity, continue to be cast as figures in the-process-of-becoming—as being(s) still searching for a proper discursive relationship to a politicized social body. Thus, even in the various feminist critiques of the Enlightenment subject that seek to “break-down” the coherent subject—black women desire what they “cannot not want” (to quote Gayatri Spivak)—namely a “coherent” subjectivity.

The most commonly repeated story about Sojourner Truth's body involves the baring of her breasts. In the various accounts of this action, her breasts become a if not the privileged signifier of her womanliness. The mere fact that Truth was exposed in this manner served to mark her not solely as “woman” but more accurately as a “black” woman. That she became a spectacle, like the famous Venus Hottentot—precisely marked her as different from the company of women who were never in this sociohistorical moment asked to bare their bodies. This display did not reveal Sojourner Truth's “private” parts (let alone the “truth” of her identity); rather, the display allowed her to perform her particular and peculiar position as a black female possessing flesh but not owning a proper (propre) body. The exposure underscored her position as a particular order of flesh that was gendered because “raced” differently.

Most of these feminist accounts of Truth's story efface the historical specificity and context of her claims. For example, Donna Haraway's argument concludes by claiming Truth as the ground to Trinh T. Minhha's theory of the “inappropriate/d other” and then places Gloris Anzaldua's “lesbian mestiza” borderlands in the middle of this unholy trinity. Haraway claims that “Truth's speech [at a feminist meeting in Akron, Ohio, 1851] was out of place, dubious doubly; she was female and black; no, that's wrong—she was a black female, a black woman, not a coherent substance with two or more attributes, but an oxymoronic singularity who stood for an entire excluded and dangerously promising humanity” (Haraway, 92). It is interesting that Haraway documents rather than edits out her own struggle to grant black women their own specifically situated identities. For while black women, as Haraway understands, are raced and gendered, they cannot function metonymically for the imbrication of race and gender. In short, they cannot continually be reproduced as the ultimate postmodern subjects.

Haraway's desire to “face [Truth's] specificity” (95) still erases Truth in certain ways. She comes to “meaning” only as a token subject whose exceptionality makes her the ground for a new ideal which she cannot on her own terms represent. Again, the only way that the black woman can be seen to be the ideal postmodern subject is if she comes to stand as the only figure who “has” or “does” race and gender together. This is a problem because, as my reading of this story has shown, all subjects are raced and gendered albeit in different ways. In other words, the black woman must not be seen as the “the Border-State”38par excellence; rather, critics must follow black feminist theory's focal shift to examine “how the borders [of difference and identity] are cut and by whom.”39

If the black woman has become a representative of “cultural unrepresentability … within prevailing philosophical ontology … in which all elements are subordinated to the privilege of the self-identical, the one, the unified” (Grosz, 195), then is her representability dependent upon the possibility of her own unification? Perhaps it is important to recall that the (im)possibility of her appearance is not a quality of the black woman herself, but rather depends upon the systemic possibility of producing her as a subject in dominant discourses. The abrupt ending of Petry's story stops short of creating the space for the entrance of this conditional subject but it allows us to see that merely being heard or seen will not help us to “solve” the problem of our (un)representability. What needs to be theorized more carefully then is the discursive conditions which allow complex subjects to appear as singular social agents. This desire must be denied or rather endlessly deferred because it is an (im)possibility in the present.40

Notes

  1. Lorraine O'Grady, “Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Afterimage (Summer 1992): 15. Subsequent references to this essay will be noted in the text.

    This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Lieutenant Lisa Bryant, a recent Princeton University graduate who was shot to death by a black male Sergeant at Fort Bragg, N.C., on July 10, 1993. I want to remember Lt. Bryant because I want her name and the violence done to her to serve as a marker for the everyday violence/erasure of black female subjects. Neither the New York Times nor the Trentonian (the New Jersey paper that reported her murder) mention Bryant's race, only her gender. When race is a factor in media descriptions, such black male/female battles are reported by the media as either evidence of black male brutality (as in the tragic case of Mike Tyson) or as evidence of gender trouble in postmodern (white) America (Thomas-Hill). Here, I allude to the fact that white feminists have made Anita Hill their emblem of sexual harassment—paying little attention to her racial specificity. As Kimberle Crenshaw has argued, Clarence Thomas's invocation of lynching erased Anita Hill's black female subjectivity as it simultaneously secured his own blackness. It was Clarence Thomas who deployed effectively the discourse of racialized sexuality epitomized by lynching. While I by no means condone or am an apologist for these contemporary crises, they do seem to be emblematic (but certainly not representative) of a particular scripted subject position in modern America.

  2. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill,” in Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 402-36.

  3. Valerie Smith elaborates on points made by Barbara Smith and Elizabeth Spelman. See Smith's “Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the Other,” in Changing Our Own Words, ed. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 47.

  4. Donna Haraway, “Ecce Homo, Ain't (Ar'n't) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Human Landscape,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 92. Subsequent references to this piece will be noted in the text. I will discuss this problem more fully in the last section of this chapter.

  5. See Valerie Smith, “Split Affinities: The Case of Interracial Rape” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990).

  6. Ann Petry, “Like a Winding Sheet,” in Miss Muriel and Other Stories, ed. Deborah McDowell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). All subsequent references to this edition will be noted in the text. The story was included in Best American Short Stories of 1946.

  7. Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, and Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, Conn.: The Feminist Press, 1982). Here, I reference a larger black feminist project that designates the “race of gender” as a phrase that underscores the fundamental imbrication of race and gender. For more on black female subjectivity, see Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 90-115.

  8. Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 67-82.

  9. Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 80. Subsequent references to this edition will be noted in the text.

  10. The dilemma of black female flesh is related to other feminist theorizations of “woman's” body. One useful example is provided by Jeanie Forte's reading of feminist performance artists. She asks, in a similar vein to this inquiry, “How might it be possible for a feminist performer to express ‘female’ pleasure, especially in terms of the female body, without resorting to essentialist categories? [She] believe[s] that … a partial answer resides in a concept of erotic agency … that women artists, manipulating imagery in order to inscribe themselves in discourse as erotic agents [who as Eileen O'Neill notes, feel their very fleshiness] might then transgress the limits of representation, and construct a different viewing space where both the spectator and the performer become differientiated subjects” (257). This idea resonates with Lorraine O'Grady's plea that serves as the epigraph for this essay. See Jeanie Forte, “Focus on the Body: Pain, Praxis, and Pleasure in Feminist Performance,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 248-62.

  11. For example, at present, anti-discrimination law does not recognize the “compounded” category “black woman”; rather, one must bring suit either as a black person or as a woman.

  12. See Karen Tucker Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women Workers in World War II,” Journal of American History 69 (June 1982): 82-97, and Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Sexual Division of Labor during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

  13. See the first chapter of Their Eyes Were Watching God, where Janie returns to the incredulous stares of her former community. The residents exclaim, “What she doin' coming back in dem overhall's? Can't she find no dress to put on? … The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; … then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength.” Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 11. Subsequent references to this edition will be noted in the text.

  14. In American iconography, the white sheet functions as a symbol of the white power movement as the raised black fist serves as the symbol for black power/liberation. Petry's piece juxtaposes these “power symbols” so that their structural resemblance and dependence is unmasked.

  15. Kathy Doby, “Long Day's Journey into White,” The Village Voice, April 28, 1992, 29.

  16. Lindon Barrett, In the Dark: Issues of Value, Evaluation, and Authority in Twentieth Century Critical Discourse, Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991, 86.

  17. Some vernacular inscriptions of time that might be relevant here are PC as in “precapitalist” time and/or the racially inscribed CP (colored people's) time.

  18. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1982). Here, it may also be useful to note that, according to my mother who grew up in the segregated South of the 1930s and 1940s, public bathrooms were marked for “White Ladies” and “Colored Women.

  19. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publisher, 1994), 9.

  20. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Press, 1952), 19.

  21. Abdul JanMohammed, “Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and the Articulation of Racialized Sexuality,” in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 111.

  22. James Thurber, quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book, ed. James Charlton (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 27.

  23. Eldridge Cleaver, quoted in Cavalcade: Negro Writing from 1760-the Present, ed. Arthur Davis and Saunders Redding (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 850.

  24. Amy Robinson, To Pass/In Drag: Strategies of Entrance into the Visible, Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992, 8.

  25. As Naomi Schor explains, “If othering involves attributing to the objectified other a difference that serves to legitimate her oppression, saming denies the objectified other the right to her difference.” See her excellent article, “The Essentialism which Is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray,” in differences (Summer 1989): 38-58.

  26. A different violent ending occurs in Petry's novel The Street (Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1946). The novel also ends with a terrifying scene of intraracial violence. The climactic slow-motion catalogue of blows the main female character, Lutie Johnson, throws at the end of The Street are “finally, … at the white world which had thrust black people into a walled enclosure from which there was no escape” (The Street, 442). Lutie's sentiments echo those of Johnson when she says of her employer/exploiter: “She wanted to hit out at him, to reduce him to a speechless mass of flesh, to destroy him completely” (The Street, 433). Lutie's murder transforms what was once Boots Smith, the black band leader, into a “thing.” The crucial difference between the texts is in degree and gender—it takes much more overt and prolonged oppression for Lutie to strike Boots Smith, whereas Johnson strikes his wife after only two incidents. Each of Petry's “Johnson” characters acts differently according to his or her gender. Thus, Lutie defends herself from rape, whereas Johnson's violence works as the equivalent of rape. Our knowledge of Johnson's life is limited by the fact that he materializes in a very short story whereas Lutie's life is detailed in more than 300 pages.

  27. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 208.

  28. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 173.

  29. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 775. Subscquent references to this edition will be noted in the text.

  30. Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, ed. Russell Ferguson et. al. (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), 55.

  31. Here, one would have to be careful not to overread Kristeva's gloss that sees the viscous as abject. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

  32. Grosz, 110. Subsequent references to this edition will be noted in the text.

  33. Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 111.

  34. Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1979), 8. For new feminist readings of this work see Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's “The Dinner Party” in Feminist Art History, ed. Amelia Jones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

  35. In an interesting article, Deborah McDowell notes the ways in which feminist critics have deployed Sojourner Truth. Specifically, McDowell cites Denise Riley and Jane Gallop for, in the former case, rewriting Truth's “ain't I a woman,” as “ain't I a floating signifier” in the opening of her justly acclaimed Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of Women in History and, in the latter case, for claiming that “the feelings [she] used to have about French men such as Lacan, [she] now has about African-American women like McDowell.” McDowell's excellent discussion of this problem does not discuss the work of Judy Chicago or Donna Haraway; however, her reading of Truth's use in and value for feminist theory concurs with my reading. See Deborah McDowell, “Transferences: Black Feminist Discourse: The Practice of Theory,” in Feminism Beside Itself, ed. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 93-118.

  36. Saidiya V. Hartman, “Excisions of the Flesh,” in Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer, ed. Saidiya V. Hartman and Beryl Wright (New York: Universe Publishing, 1992), 61.

  37. Hortense Spillers, “Interstices,” 77. It should be noted that Ethel Smyth, a lesbian composer, is represented by a piano in Chicago's piece.

  38. This is purportedly the term Frederick Douglass used to refer to his first wife, who was black. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “A Dangerous Literacy: The Legacy of Frederick Douglass,” New York Times Book Review, May 28, 1995, 16.

  39. Hortense Spillers, “Introduction,” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5.

  40. Here, I refer to Judith Butler's mandate “not to celebrate each … new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally … impossible.” Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 148-49.

I would like to thank Elizabeth Alexander, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Ann Kibbey, Katherine Kinney, Carole-Anne Tyler, Ashraf Rushdy, and the anonymous members of the Genders editorial board for their helpful comments on this essay.

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